Skylarking

Skylarking is gearing up for Black Friday, but you can get an early start with these home entertainment and computer specials from TigerDirect.

SONY BRAVIA HDTVs w/FREE Blu-Ray Player.- (11/9 – 11/16/09) or while supplies last!

SAVE $545 – FREE SHIPPING - Sony Bravia II 40″ LCD HDTV KDL40V5100 w/ Sony BDP-N460 Network Blu-Ray Disc Player Bundle $954.98. I’ve been wanting to get one of these network blu-ray disc players. Hook them up to your home network to stream movies, videos, music, and more right off the Internet from Netflix, YouTube, and more. Plus you can also play and upscale your standard DVDs to near high definition with this player.

SAVE $650 – FREE SHIPPING - Sony 52″ Bravia V LCD HDTV KDL52V5100 w/ Sony BDP-N460 Network Blu-Ray Disc Player Bundle $1,599.98. One more foot of viewing space on your screen with fantastic Sony Bravia features. Too many to list, and, once again, the same great network Blu-ray player as before.

SAVE $750 – FREE SHIPPING – Sony 55″ LCD HDTV KDL55V5100 w/ Sony BDP-N460 Blu-ray Disc Player Bundle $1,799.98.

BEST SELLERS.- (11/9 – 11/16/09) or while supplies last!

• SAVE $40 – FREE SHIPPING – AOC 20″ Widescreen LCD Monitor with 1680 x 1050 pixels of resolution, a 3000:1 Dynamic Contrast Ratio for crisp images with sharp black and white. Has a VGA connector for use with any PC or notebook. All yours for $109.99.
• SAVE $20 – FREE SHIPPING – ACER Aspire Desktop with an AMD Athlon 2.6GHz processor, 2GB of DDR2 RAM (memory), a massive 320GB hard disk drive for storing all your files. All powered by Vista Home Premium. $249.99. This computer is eligible for a free Windows 7 upgrade, too.
• SAVE $200 – FREE SHIPPING – HP Pavilion dv2 Notebook with an AMD Athlon Neo 1.6GHz processor, 2GB of DDR2 RAM (memory), a 250GB hard disk drive (storage) with an external DVD-RW (rewriteable DVD burner). The screen measures 12.1 inches. Comes with Windows Vista Premium $549.99 after $50 MIR, rebate expires 01/16/2010. Plus you can get a Windows 7 upgrade for this machine.
  

  Gateway Win7 Notebook $700

• SAVE $90 – FREE SHIPPING - HP Pavilion G70 Notebook with an Intel Core2Duo T6500 processor with a 2.1GHz clock speed, 4GB of DDR2 RAM (memory), and 320GB of hard disk space. A large 17 inch screen tops it off. With Windows Vista Premium (64-bit) This is a refurbished unit for $579.97. Upgrade it to Windows 7 while you’re at it.
• SAVE $150 – FREE SHIPPING – Gateway Notebook Intel Core2 Duo T6600 2.2GHz processor, 4GB of DDR3 RAM (memory), a 500GB hard drive for storage, and a large 17.3 inch LED screen. Equipped with the Microsoft Windows 7 Premium 64-bit operating system for a mere $699.99.

Grammatically speaking, I am not too certain about that headline, but subjectwise I’d like to thank “Reel Advice” from the “Reel Advice Movie review” blog for commenting on my Sept. 4 post about the Portable DVD and CD Drive for $40. They said:

Pretty nice deal for a portable drive but I will wait for portable Bluray drives before buying one of my own!

For me, Blu-ray wasn’t a consideration because I don’t have any Blu-ray discs — data or video — except for one or two accidental purchases, Superman II and Iron Man, which I have long since sold on eBay. Additionally, I bought the Lite-On ETDU10896 External Slim DVD ROM from TigerDirect.com purely for installing software and transferring files to computers other than my own. The other consideration was price. I didn’t want to spend more than $60 including tax.

But Reel Advice’s comment made me go back and search for portable blu-ray drives all the same. The results were interesting… for a while.

External Blu-Ray Drives

It turns out there are only two External / Portable Blu-Ray drives out there under $100 from “major” manufacturers: The LG BE06LU10 Super Multi Blue and the Panasonic UJ-120, but, for the most part, they are not available for “retail” sale; they’re pretty much ”OEM”. OEM is ”Original Equipment Manufacturer” which means they are for purchase by computer manufacturers. So if you are not an equipment manufacturer, and you buy one of these drives, and something goes wrong with it, you won’t be able to get any support from the manufacturer. (I had that happen once with an OEM motherboard I bought. There was a retail version available, but the OEM version was cheaper. Sadly, when I had trouble with the motherboard, I couldn’t get any assistance. I lived with it. Buyer beware, etc. I should have known better.)

So you can’t go to Best Buy and get any of these drives now, but they are available through other sites online.

One such site, TriangleLaptops.com, had a nice list of requirements for the Panasonic UJ-120 to work properly on your PC. Here’s the run down from their site:

• Required software is not included.
• This will function fine with your existing DVD and CD viewing and recording software.
• To watch Blu-Ray movies, you will need HD capable software such as PowerDVD 8 Ultra, PowerDVD Suite 6 or ArcSoftTotalMedia Theater.
• To use the drive as Blu-Ray player, your system needs to meet the following requirements:
• Operating system: Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or better or Windows Vista
• CPU: Core Duo or Core 2 Duo systems are generally compatible with Blu-ray disc drives. If your PC has a single processor (e.g. Intel Pentium 4), it should be at least 3.2 Ghz or have an AMD Athlon 64 FX games model, or an Intel Pentium EE Edition.
• Memory: At least 1 GB RAM
• Graphics card: This is the important part! You will need an nVidia GeForce 7600 GT or higher or an AMD/ATI X1600 or higher. You will need at least 256MB graphics memory and your card should support HDCP. Contact the manufacturer directly or visit their site for video adapter specifications if you aren’t sure whether your graphics card is HDCP enabled. You may also want to confirm that you have a graphics adapter driver version which supports Blu-ray discs (AMD/ATI Catalyst 6.7 and higher or nVidia ForceWare 93.71), and download the latest driver if necessary.
• We know this list of requirements is intimidating. You’ll often be covered if your computer is a fairly recent model. We attached the USB 2.0 Blu-Ray drive to our Dell XPS M2010, installed the PowerDVD 8 Ultra and had no problem at all viewing a Blu-Ray movie.

Good points.

Vista System Properties

If you’re interested in seeing if your Windows (XP or Vista) computer meets these requirements, do the following:

1. On the desktop, right-click on “My Computer”. A list a ppears. (Alternately, you can go to the “Control Panel” on your Start menu, then double-click “System”.)
2. Click “Properties”. A system properties dialog box appears.
3. On the screen you will find information for your computer’s “Operating System”, the “Processor” (CPU), and “Memory (RAM)”.
4. Click the “Hardware” tab (XP) and/or “Device Manager”.
5. Double-click “Display adapters” to see what graphics card you have. (You may have to do some research here to see if your card meets the requirements on the list above.)

And if you have any further questions, don’t hesitate to contact me here at Skylarking.

Corel, the makers of WordPerfect, VideoStudio, and Paint Shop Pro, is having a special online sale which ends at midnight on May 31. Here are some links to some of their products. The links will let Corel know you found out about the sale from Skylarking.

Save Up to $40 on Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 Ultimate. Full $99.99 $59.99. Offer ends Midnight 05/31/09: Paint Shop Pro is a very popular and easy to use photo and image editing program. It’s popular with high school and college students, and very handy for web site developers, too.

Save $40 on Corel VideoStudio™ Pro X2. Full $99.99 Only $59.99. Offer Ends Midnight 05/31/09: I have been using Corel VideoStudio for many years now to edit my home movies from my digital camcorder. With VideoStudio you can import video from most digital camcorders, edit them, and burn them onto DVDs which can be used in most DVD players and game consoles like the Xbox 360 or PlayStation. You can even use VideoStudio Pro to upload your videos onto YouTube. It’s a great product, and I recommend it highly. And this is a great price.

Save up to $30 on WordPerfect Office X4 Standard. Full $299.99 $269.99. Offer Ends Midnight 05/31/09 : WordPerfect Office includes the WordPerfect word processor, the Quattro Pro spreadsheet application, the Presentations slideshow application, Visual Intelligence SE for creating charts and graphs, the WordPerfect Lightning notation application, and WordPerfect Mail for email. It also includes tools for opening and creating PDFs and web sites.

FREE $40 GelaSkins laptop Cover & Photo Painter webinar with Corel Painter 11 from $199.00. Expires Midnight 05/31/09: If you purchase a copy of Corel Painter 11 online through Corel.com before this offer ends, you will receive protective GelaSkins laptop cover (a $40 value) for your laptop, and an invite to attend an online seminar to learn more about using Corel photo Painter 11.

Save $30 on Corel Photo & Video Bundle only $149.99 $119.99. This package deal provides you with the tools for editing your digital photos and videos with your personal computer. This bundle contains Paint Shop Pro X2 Ultimate for photo editing, and Video Studio Pro X2 for video editing and video CD and DVD burning. You can also create videos which can be played back on your video capable iPod, iTouch, iPhone. or T-Mobile G1. This package also includes a 2 GB USB flash drive, and WinDVD for playing DVDs on your PC using your PC’s DVD drive. Read more about each of these applications in my descriptions above.

Save $40 on WinDVD 9 Plus Blu-ray. Full $99.99 $59.99. Ends Midnight 05/31/09. WinDVD9 Plus Blu-ray allows you to play DVDs and Blu-ray DVDs on your PC’s DVD or Blu-ray DVD drive for enjoying Hi-Def video discs on your computer. If you’re not sure your computer is equipped to handle Hi-Def Video and Blu-ray you can download Corel’s Hi-Definition Advisor Tool to check your computer system’s compatibility. WinDVD 9 also supports Dolby Digital EX Pro Logic II, Real Player, QuickTime, DivX, AVCGD, and DTS Digital Surround. And it’s compatible with Windows Vista.

Feel free to contact me about these products, or add your comments on this offer and the products with the links below.

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